Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a technology that allows control over the consumption of various media objects, such as ring tones, images, and other objects, by mobile terminals. DRM is a term used to describe a range of techniques that use information about rights and rights holders to manage copyright material and the terms and conditions on which the material is made available to users. More specifically, DRM involves the description, layering, analysis, valuation, trading, and monitoring of an owner's property rights to an asset. DRM covers the management of the digital rights to the physical manifestation of a work (e.g., a textbook) or the digital manifestation of a work (e.g., an Internet web page). DRM also covers the management of an asset whether the asset has a tangible or an intangible value. Current DRM technologies include languages for describing the terms and conditions for an asset, tracking asset usage by enforcing controlled environments or encoded asset manifestations, and closed architectures for the overall management of the digital rights.
In OMA DRM technology, control is exercised by supplementing each media object with a rights object. The rights object defines rules according to which the media object is consumed. With some adjustments, this technology can also be applied to Java Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP) applications. MIDP provides the core application functionality required by mobile applications, including the user interface, network connectivity, local data storage, and application lifecycle management. This functionality is packaged as a standardized Java runtime environment and set of Java technology application programming interfaces (APIs).
Currently, OMA DRM is not used for the protection of Java MIDP applications. Before OMA DRM can be used for such protection, a system and method is needed for applying the OMA DRM permission model to applications. This includes both the selection of applicable permissions and the definition of rules for the enforcement of these permissions